{"id":30473,"date":"2024-02-29T18:03:09","date_gmt":"2024-02-29T23:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=30473"},"modified":"2024-03-04T08:02:57","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T13:02:57","slug":"critically-acclaimed-novelist-jesmyn-ward-to-speak-at-furman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/critically-acclaimed-novelist-jesmyn-ward-to-speak-at-furman\/","title":{"rendered":"Critically acclaimed novelist Jesmyn Ward to speak at Furman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two-time National Book Award winner and MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow Jesmyn Ward<\/a> will speak at Furman University Wednesday, March 20, at 6:30 p.m. in Watkins Room of the Trone Student Center. Ward\u2019s talk, \u201cTell It Whole: On Witness and Narrative,\u201d is free and open to the public. It is the Crabtree-Stewart Lecture, named for beloved Furman English professors John H. Crabtree (1925-2019) and James T. Stewart (1923-2001).<\/p>\n

Ward\u2019s visit to Furman was originally set for 2020 \u2013 about the same time COVID upended travel and gatherings everywhere, said Willard Pate<\/a>, professor of English. Pate, who arrived at Furman in 1964 and specializes in Southern literature, first learned of Ward\u2019s work through a bookstore she follows in Oxford, Mississippi, which hosted the author for a reading. Pate began to read her novels, study them, and now she teaches selected works in her classes.<\/p>\n

Pate doesn\u2019t claim to have a favorite Ward novel. \u201cI like all of it,\u201d she said, noting Ward is often compared to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison.<\/p>\n

Ward is author of \u201cWhere the Line Bleeds,\u201d \u201cSalvage the Bones,\u201d which won the 2011 National Book Award, and \u201cSing, Unburied, Sing,\u201d which earned the 2017 National Book Award. Among other works, the Tulane University English professor is editor of the anthology \u201cThe Fire This Time\u201d and author of the memoir \u201cMen We Reaped,\u201d a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and, Pate said, \u201cone of the most powerful series of prose essays I have ever read.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because she\u2019s taught \u201cSing, Unburied, Sing\u201d three times, Pate knows it best. She\u2019s equally impressed by Ward\u2019s latest novel, \u201cLet Us Descend<\/a>,\u201d whose protagonist is an enslaved woman in the antebellum South. Pate is reading through it for the third time.<\/p>\n

Pate said the timing of Ward\u2019s visit \u2013 on the heels of Black History Month and during Women\u2019s History Month \u2013 draws attention to the struggles of Black women and the importance of women\u2019s voices in general. She expects Ward will draw from her own journey during her talk and will likely share a more practical side of her craft.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think she\u2019ll talk about how you turn an experience or awareness of something into a narrative,\u201d Pate said. \u201cShe\u2019ll undoubtedly talk about the experiences that people have, but how do you write them?\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of Furman\u2019s Cultural Life Program, the Crabtree-Stewart lecture is funded in part by OLLI at Furman and supported by FurmanWIN (Women\u2019s Impact Network). For more information, please contact the Department of English at 864-294-2066.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two-time National Book Award winner and MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow Jesmyn Ward will speak at Furman Wednesday, March 20, at 6:30 p.m. in Watkins Room. Ward\u2019s talk, \u201cTell It Whole: On Witness and Narrative,\u201d is free and open to the public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":257,"featured_media":30475,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,31,85,61],"tags":[2600,2601,2599],"class_list":["post-30473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-english","category-olli-at-furman","category-the-furman-advantage","tag-crabtree-stewart-lecture","tag-national-book-award","tag-tulane-university"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/257"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}